Gold Capped: Quick Auctions Poster does the undercutting for you

Every week,Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail!

Quick Auctions Poster is here, and it's going to change your life. It was written by one of the auctioneers who inhabit the Just My Two Copper forums, and here's the description of what it does, straight from the download page:

This addon is a plugin for Quick Auctions that adds a checkbox to the auction house posting frame with which you can toggle continuous scanning and posting of Quick Auctions. It saves you the effort of hitting the post button whenever a scan has finished. Sadly, because this Quick Auctions button doesn't have a name and its function is private, this action can't be macroed, but this addon manages to obtain the correct button and simulates a click on it.

In essence, you can fill your bags up with stock, and instead of using QA3 to post a single batch, it will keep refreshing your scan for you while you wander off to do something else. It will keep automatically undercutting everyone until you run out of stock.

There's only one button the addon adds, and that's the one at the top of the following image:

Once you check the box labeled "Continue posting after initial post," you will keep relisting your inventory, only undercutting by your QA3 settings when someone undercuts you. You need to check in every half-hour or so to cancel all your undercut auctions as well as pick up mail.

This would be most useful in situations where there is very little deposit cost; however, there's a minimum of 1 silver per auction since the last patch. If you're going to use this on glyphs or enchant scrolls, be aware that you're putting yourself at a slight risk for churning through lost deposit money.

This looks unfair!

I know -- but now that some people use it, anyone who doesn't use it is basically allowing himself to be priced out of the market. Now, instead of whoever posted latest being the deciding factor in who gets the business, it will be the person who is willing to go to the lowest price. This is good for buyers, because competing auctioneers won't win business because they happened to be the last to log in but because they have a lower bottom limit on their prices.

My esteemed co-host on Call To Auction, Markco, holds that this new tool is not breaking the terms of service. He may be right, but I suspect it's probably not an intended use of the addon development tools provided by Blizzard. We've seen situations like this before:

Auctioneer used to have a feature called BottomFeeder that would trawl the auction house for cheap deals; it ended up getting removed on the advice of Blizzard.

AVR was deliberately broken by Blizzard because it trivialized certain parts of the game.

Some tips for effective usage

When you are setting up, remember that the more stock you have in your bags, the more undercut cycles you have. Assuming your competitors will be using Quick Auctions Poster, you have two ways to beat them: have more stock than they do, or have a lower threshold than they do.

If you elect to have more stock than your competitors, you should consider the maximum stack size when you're deciding the markets in which to use this. Cut gems, for example, cannot be stacked. The new metric you should consider is the profit per inventory slot, and this will depend on how often you expect to have to undercut before you reach the bottom of your opponent's pile, as well as how many you think you can sell in a night.

If you go in the direction of trying to out-price your competitors, remember that you can't shock them into another market. QA3 doesn't get bored or upset -- it will just continue to list until your stock is cheaper than it's willing to sell for. My threshold is usually set to my cost plus 10 percent; however, it gets messy. Some players consider the cost of their goods what they paid for the raw mats before processing, and some people prefer to use what they could sell the half-finished goods for. For example: If a stack of Adder's Tongue costs 12g, and you can sell an Ink of the Sea for 1g and Snowfall Ink for 10g, how much does a glyph that takes a single IotS cost? If you base it on the market price for ink, remember that you'd never be able to sell all the ink you put into glyphs and vellum, and trying to do so would drop the price down significantly. If you base it on the cost of the source herbs, you will get an average of six IotS and one snowfall per stack. Did those snowfalls cost you 6g and the IotS 1g each? Or half a gold for each IotS and 9g for the snowfall?Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped, plus the author's Call to Auction podcast. Do you have questions about selling, reselling and building your financial empire on the auction house? Basil is now taking questions for a special series, "Ask an auctioneer," at basil@wow.com.